8

Sheep grazed among the burial jars on the hillside. They were of the short-legged flat-country breed with white fleece, but they made Garric feel homesick regardless.

"O Shepherd, kindly to your children," the underpriest said. He was a young man but already balding; the afternoon sun had raised beads of sweat on his high forehead. "Do not let this your son Benlo be put to death in the Underworld."

Benlo's body lay in the outdoor chapel. Over him was a rented pall of crimson silk with gold borders; his face, arranged by the chapel's cosmeticians into an expression of stern grandeur, was bare to the open sky. During the brief time Garric knew him, the drover's visage had generally been hidden behind a mask of false good humor; if Benlo's life had gone other ways, the image on the bier might really have been his.

"Do not let the bright jewels of Benlo's eyes be covered with the dust of the Underworld," the priest intoned. His robe of bleached wool was too hot for this weather. The garment was a relic of ancient times: the formal wear of the Old Kingdom. Memories of King Carus judging legal disputes whispered through Garric's mind; court officials wore colored garments, but the mass of litigants, attorneys, and jurors gleamed in white wool.

The funeral chapel on the hilltop overlooking Carcosa was a low rectangular building with workrooms and storage inside. There was an entrance in one wall and a different deity's statue in a niche outside each of the others. Services were in the open air: each statue was fronted by a stone bier and pavement. Garric supposed the chapel could accommodate three funerals at once, but he doubted that was normal practice.

Liane cried softly. Perhaps this noble-looking corpse was the father she remembered from her childhood, the man who sang to his wife and daughter.

"Do not let the marble of Benlo's teeth be burned in the lime-maker's kiln," the priest said. He seemed a decent sort of man. The condolences he'd offered Liane before the service had sounded sincere, not just the mouthing of a bureaucrat looking ahead to the largest fee he'd collect in this next week or longer. For all that, he'd run through this service too often for the words to be much more than words.

Tenoctris stood with Garric and Liane as the only mourners. The old woman watched things that Garric didn't see, couldn't see. Her hands were clasped and her face would have been grim if it had any expression at all.

Garric wondered which deity presided over most funerals here in Carcosa. In the borough no one doubted that the Lady was queen of heaven, but her consort the Shepherd was closer to people's normal lives. Folks were more likely to spill a drop of milk or crumble a bit of bread to Duzi or before a little carving against the back wall of their hut anyway. The Great Gods ruled heaven from temples elsewhere, but a peasant lived with sheep dung and the pain of childbirth.

"Do not let the lustrous wood of Benlo's flesh be broken for kindling," said the priest, mopping his brow unconsciously with a fold of his robe. Garric wondered what they did when it rained.

Four local laborers waited to transport the body. They were solid, middle-aged men; obviously bored but maintaining the polite silence that was part of their stock-in-trade.

Would Benlo have had more mourners if he'd died on Sandrakkan? Probably not: whatever the man had done involved his utter ruin and disgrace. It took a better person than the one Liane described her father having become to retain his friends after a disaster so complete.

"Loving Shepherd, do not let your son Benlo be put to death in the Underworld!"

Nobody in Barca's Hamlet prayed to the Sister. Her name was simply a curse and a rare one at that: people had the ingrained suspicion that to name a thing was to call it to you. Here, the third face of the funeral chapel held a statue of the Sister in all her majesty as Queen of the Underworld: snake-headed scepter, skirt of thighbones, and necklace of human skulls.

The Sister's bier and pavement looked as well-worn as those serving the Shepherd and the Lady. Garric supposed it made sense to ask the blessing of the mistress of the dead at a funeral, but the notion still made him uncomfortable. Death wasn't evil: you culled your herd for the winter and Nature culled her herd, mankind included, for the same reason. But nonetheless there was something perverse about praying to death.

"Benlo bor-Benliman," the priest said, stumbling slightly over the family name. He wouldn't have officiated over many nobles out of all the hundreds of funerals he'd conducted. "Accept the water of life, that you may spring forth from the Underworld."

It was a hot day; the aromatics with which the chapel's staff had embalmed Benlo masked but did not fully conceal the odor of decay. The process normally involved the surgical removal of the dead man's organs so that his body cavity could be packed with spices.

Strasedon had simplified the task of Benlo's embalmers.

The priest dipped a golden aspergillum into the bowl of water on a stand beside the bier and flicked a few droplets on the face of the corpse. Replacing the aspergillum, the priest took a pinch of barley meal from golden salver beside the bowl. "Benlo bor-Benliman, accept the bread of life that you may rise refreshed from the Underworld."

The gold dishes came with the pall of silk brocade for funerals of the highest quality. Middle-class folk were memorialized with silver and a linen covering; the priests used pottery bowls and dealt with the poor in groups; if there was a pall, the deceased's family had provided it themselves.

If the deceased was wealthy, his or her household was expected to wail and follow the coffin. A chorus of six professional mourners came with the price of a first-class funeral; additional mourners could be hired as well. Liane had refused even the six, to the considerable surprise of the chapel's priest.

The priest dusted the barley meal over Benlo's face. The pads of his thumb and forefinger were sweaty: much of the white powder clung to them till he rubbed them surreptitiously on the sleeve of his robe. It was only symbolic anyway.

The priest drew the pall over Benlo's face and bowed three times to the image of the Shepherd: a slender youth standing with his staff slanted over his right shoulder. Turning to Liane, the priest said, "Mistress, the service is complete. Shall I . . . ?"

"Please do," the girl said curtly. She wiped her eyes with a handkerchief, then folded it neatly and returned it to her left sleeve.

The priest nodded to the laborers, who came forward with practiced smoothness; each man went to his allotted corner of the bier without fumbling for position. They lifted the frame supporting the corpse and walked with it into the chapel.

The bier remained. Its sides were decorated with tree-of-life carvings. Garric thought of the similarly decorated coffins in the ancient graveyard near the Red Ox. Families buried their dead simply in the borough, returning to the soil the bodies of those who'd worked it in life.

Garric didn't know which way was right. Maybe what mattered was that people followed their own traditions, whatever those traditions were. Deep in Garric's mind, King Carus chuckled in agreement.

"Ah," said the priest to Liane. "I'll go with them and oversee matters, if I may?"

"Of course," Liane said. She was completely under control now. She wore the blue garment in which she'd arrived at Barca's Hamlet. Her only concession to the occasion was to wear a bonnet of pure white, the color of high mourning.

Nodding again, the priest followed the laborers into the building. Farther down the hillside, an old woman knelt beside a burial jar whose paint had mostly weathered away to the pale red of sun-bleached terra-cotta. As Garric watched, she placed a bunch of flowers on the jar.

Liane turned and touched hands with Garric and Tenoctris both. She smiled sadly. "You two are all I have left now that I've lost my father," she said. "Will you come with me to Erdin to learn what happened to him?"

Tenoctris looked at Garric, then at the younger woman. "The path to the answer may lead much farther than to Sandrakkan, Liane," Tenoctris said. "And it will certainly be dangerous. More dangerous than even you realize. I'm afraid that there are worse things than death."

"I can't live without trying to learn," Liane said simply. "I lost my father years ago but I looked the other way, I pretended what I saw wasn't really happening. I won't do that again."

Tenoctris nodded. "So long as you understand," she said. She turned and went on, "Then it's up to you, Garric. My path lies with you."

She smiled broadly; it made her look like a different woman, far younger and more feminine. "I suppose it does, anyway. If I'm simply a pebble rolling downhill, then I suppose one bounce is as good as another."

The priest preceded the four laborers from the building. They carried poles which were thrust through the ears of the jar into which Benlo's corpse had been folded. The only decoration on the jar's side was a starburst in white paint. The hot tar that sealed the lid over the body had a resinous, piney odor.

The two women were looking at Garric. "Yes," he said. "I'll come with you, Liane."

King Carus bellowed his world-filling laugh.